Abstract The composition of leadership and staff working at international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has gained increased scrutiny from funders and other stakeholders. This attention is often driven by how diversity of INGO personnel matters for organizational performance and perceptions of legitimacy. In the United States, disclosing demographic information about leadership and staff remains voluntary. In this study, we analyzed how the top 1 % of U.S.-based INGOs self-reported demographic data about their personnel using GuideStar’s organizational demographics reporting system. Building on the GuideStar system, we propose a novel demographic diversity score (DDS) designed to ascertain and compare INGO reporting practices. We find that the most frequently reported role category is the organization’s leader, while the leading reported demographic categories were gender and race/ethnicity. We also find that the current GuideStar demographic reporting system highlights social identity-based diversity categories, while not covering functional or cognitive dimensions. The DDS can help INGO leadership and staff have conversations about two questions relevant for performance and legitimacy: what specific diversity dimensions matter to a given mission (1), and how much reporting of such information is appropriate for engaging stakeholders (2). Specific choices and trade-offs in answering each of these questions are elaborated. As diversity issues have become more controversial in U.S. public discourse, this research not only advances our understanding of how demographic composition matters but also frames further discussions about possible reforms of nonprofit (self-)regulatory frameworks focused on demographic issues in the United States and elsewhere.
Nepal's Draft Association Act, 2025 is the third attempt to regulate civil society organizations (CSOs) under Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli's administration. Although the draft responds to legitimate concerns about administrative coherence, accountability, federal alignment, and foreign funding oversight, its chosen instruments are disproportionate to those stated goals, overly centralized, and likely to restrict associational freedom. The analysis examines four key dimensions: establishment and registration, operational scope, state supervision, and resource access. The draft centralizes registration authority under the Ministry of Home Affairs, introduces vague morality clauses enabling arbitrary denials, imposes complex multi-tiered approval processes for foreign funding, and establishes extensive surveillance mechanisms. These provisions disproportionately burden smaller, community-based organizations while undermining Nepal's federal principles. The brief situates Nepal's approach within a global pattern of closing civic space and argues that the draft act represents a directional shift toward greater state control of civil society and offers recommendations for creating an enabling environment that balances accountability with organizational autonomy, consistent with constitutional guarantees of associational freedom.
International NGOs (INGOs) operating under authoritarianism face compound institutional pressures. In China, the 2016 Overseas NGO Law creates both entry barriers by limiting legal registration and resource barriers by restricting funding channels. Although researchers examined how INGOs respond to authoritarian control, commercialization remains underexplored as a strategic response. Drawing on Oliver's theory of organizations' strategic responses to institutional pressures, I examine why and how an INGO in China commercialized under these compound pressures. I deploy qualitative document analysis to study a Western NGO's operations in China from 2017 to 2020. The organization initially pursued compromise by registering as a business while continuing nonprofit projects and seeking formal INGO status. As INGO registration stalled and home-country funding declined, this partial conformity could no longer secure sufficient legitimacy or resources. The organization shifted toward avoidance through domain change, spinning off its China office into an independent for-profit local entity. The case illustrates that for an INGO, commercialization can serve as an adaptation to authoritarian regulation and as a process of organizational transformation.
In an era of polycrisis, where public health, migration, and geopolitical shocks increasingly overlap, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become central actors in crisis governance. Yet we still know relatively little about how NGOs sustain resilience across overlapping crises. This study examines how Czech NGOs navigated the Ukrainian refugee crisis in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, situating their actions within governance systems characterized by fragmented state capacity and uneven institutional support. Based on a two-year mixed-methods study combining interviews with NGO leaders and a survey of 235 NGOs, we identify three resilience strategies: cross-organizational collaboration, mobilization of supporters, and direct service provision. The findings suggest that capacities developed during the pandemic were reactivated during the refugee response, enabling NGOs to rapidly expand services despite resource constraints. By tracing how these strategies evolved from early improvisation to more institutionalized coordination, the study conceptualizes NGO resilience as a dynamic and temporally layered process shaped by prior crisis experience and governance constraints. The findings highlight the need for policy frameworks that better recognize and support NGOs as essential partners in crisis governance.
This paper develops the concept of nonprofit organizational deviance. Organizational deviance refers to practices by whole organizations rather than practices by members that are problematic. To fit the categories proposed here, organizational deviance must engage the purposes or mission of the organization and must be a focus of its core activities. As such, deviance is not pathological. As a sociological concept, deviant behavior relates to norms of a community or reference group. Some people view deviance as inherently negative or stigmatizing but this is not necessarily the case. In statistics, deviation from the norm may be positive, negative, or simply normal. This is also the case with nonprofit organizations. Organizations whose structures and processes do not conform to the conventional model of good practice might be considered deviant, but they are doing important, valued work. There is tacit acceptance among nonprofit scholars and practitioners of a "conventional model of organizations", represented by major on-line evaluation systems like GuideStar and Charity Navigator. But there are important exceptions to the conventional model, often represented by deviant organizations. These exceptions show us there is much to learn from a theoretical exploration of the concept of organizational deviance. Four categories of deviant, nonprofit organizations are the focus of our attention: (1) Rebellious organizations. These organizations challenge established laws or institutional practices, may engage in illegal practices, may cross national boundaries, and they often use the social movement organizational form. (2) Positively deviant organizations. These organizations create innovative programs or practices that overcome failures incorporated into standard operating procedures in an industry or organizational field. The normal practices are ineffective or destructive but participants in the field either do not recognize this failure or have no motivation to improve. (3) Administratively deviant organizations. Organizational practices may conform to criteria of the standard organizational model but the mission, purpose or historically institutionalized practices of the organization cause harm. (4) Normatively deviant organizations. In these organizations, core purposes and activities clash with dominant social norms. These may involve weird or stigmatized activities. Alternatively, they may promote organizational methods that are self-consciously "anti-bureaucratic" and that, as a consequence, lead to forms of structure or processes that are dramatically different from those of the conventional model of organizations.
This paper examines how adopting UN 2030 Agenda's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as strategic objectives shapes foundations' strategic practices, i.e. the ways they frame and try to contribute to sustainability challenges, design and implement interventions, and evaluate and account for their impacts vis-& agrave;-vis relevant stakeholders. Albeit an increasing number of foundations report alignment with the SDG framework, more evidence of its strategic implications is needed. Towards that end, a comprehensive review of academic and grey literature (2015-2024) is combined with a multiple case study. Innovative strategic practices towards SDGs by Canadian foundations are identified based on extreme case sampling. Data are collected from multiple sources, including 11 in-depth interviews with experts, representatives and top managers from 3 national networks and 4 foundations. Findings suggest that the more socially innovative practices have the potential to impact both the organizational and interorganizational levels, and ultimately public policy. Practices that are typical of strategic philanthropy with a social innovation and policy orientation are delved into, and the importance of framing as a strategic practice is emphasized. They span not only the value proposition, logic model and accountability of foundations, but also interorganizational practices (e.g. convening, collaboration, scaling up, in or out, or advocacy) that are typical of multistakeholder emergent or ecosystem strategies in the face of complexity. Findings from the perspective of foundation networks shed light on isomorphic interorganizational diffusion of strategic practices and frame alignment processes. Finally, implications for foundation policy are explored, unveiling the utility of SDG-oriented framings of sustainability challenges for foundations to influence the broader system where they operate by removing strategic constraints. Our contribution to the philanthropic literature is a broader and more nuanced vision of strategic philanthropy practices in the face of complex, systemic challenges, where traditional funding roles (e.g. supplementation) are substituted by innovative roles that better align foundations' practices with their self-perceived functions and external role expectations, reinforcing their legitimacy in the public arena.
As the dominant economic ideology for almost half a century, neoliberalism has reshaped various aspects of society, including governments and nonprofit organisations. This article explores how this transformation has impacted Australian nonprofit sector advocacy, those activities ranging from public protest to face-to-face lobbying, whereby nonprofit organisations attempt to shift institutional powerholders on behalf of collective interests. One key change is the way in which Australian nonprofits have been funded; the neoliberal era in Australia, managed by both centre-left and centre-right governments, has seen the mass marketisation of human service delivery and a surge in nonprofits providing government-funded human service delivery. Concurrently, and in part as a result, Australian nonprofit advocacy has taken on a quiet character, favouring insider practices and modest goals. At the same time, Australian governments over the period have introduced a variety of laws which seek to discourage and constrain advocacy activities such as democratic protest. These changes necessitate a third change, in the relationships between nonprofit organisations and governments, between nonprofit organisations and each other and, perhaps most significantly, between nonprofit organisations and their constituencies. By discussing these shifting resource allocations, advocacy strategies and relationships, we suggest that the neoliberal era has reoriented the normative relationship between the state, the market and civil society, expanding the influence of the market to a degree that both governments and nonprofit organisations find difficulty resisting its pull. We conclude by noting the importance of nonprofit organisations renewing and reinvigorating their connections with people and communities.
The nonprofit sector is a vital component of good governance, yet it remains unclear how different factors interact to shape its development. This study employs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method to examine how demand- and supply-side factors combine to influence nonprofit sector density across jurisdictions, using Chinese social service nonprofits as the empirical context. We identify three pathways to high nonprofit sector density and two pathways to low density, each involving a distinct combination of demand- and supply-side conditions. There is no singular formula for understanding nonprofit sector density; rather, it emerges from different mixes of these factors through various pathways. The findings unpack the causal complexity underlying nonprofit sector density by providing new evidence from a non-Western setting and offering fresh insight into how nonprofit theories operate in configuration.
We discuss the research process and outcomes related to updating and integrating two datasets containing information on nonprofit regulations: (1) the Legal Compendium (LC), a publicly available online resource that identifies important legal requirements for nonprofits in 56 U.S. states and jurisdictions, created in consultation with state charity regulators and (2) the Legal Text Data (LTD), a repository of digitized text of state regulatory statutes. We provide details on the process, the importance, examples of analysis that can be done with the data and potential next steps for the research agenda.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States and globally are at a historic juncture. The available data on trust and confidence in NGOs internationally suggests that NGOs suffer from trust and reputation deficits, implying that concerns about NGO effectiveness and accountability may not be adequately addressed through existing systems of oversight and regulation. Compounding this challenge, NGOs in many countries face a backlash in which governments restrict, reduce, or eliminate funding sources for NGOs and curtail freedoms with implicit and explicit threats. This paper argues that understanding the nature of this inflection point in the United States is enhanced by placing it in the larger context of the global NGO regulatory architecture. The past few decades have seen the proliferation across the globe of a wide variety of institutional arrangements for regulating NGOs, resulting in a complicated patchwork of governmental and nongovernmental regulatory regimes operating across many overlapping jurisdictions. We examine the nongovernmental regulation of NGOs as a response to information deficits that remain under-resolved by governmental regulation. We argue that NGOs require trust and reputational legitimacy to attract public support and funding. But NGOs face real challenges to greater transparency at the same time that government regulation struggles to provide adequate quality assurances for current information disclosures to the satisfaction of all relevant stakeholders. This gap creates a market for information that is often filled by nongovernmental regulation systems. In this article we explore the structure of these private, nongovernmental regulation regimes at the national and transnational levels to derive insights for increasing NGO trustworthiness and legitimacy by bolstering the NGO data ecosystem.
Scholars have long emphasized the benefits nonprofit organizations, such as civic and arts institutions, bring to their communities, suggesting residents may prefer locations with a strong nonprofit sector. While residents may prefer nonprofits, a sociological literature related to land use conflicts suggests that many social service nonprofits may encounter hostility. Investigating resident preference for nonprofits has theoretical and practical implications for understanding the distribution of their benefits, as well as the implications of nonprofit location decisions. Using rich data on residential homes and sales in Cuyahoga County Ohio from 2014 to 2016 (n = 59,865) this study estimates preference for nonprofit organizations using hedonic price analysis. The results present strong evidence that residents prefer to be near nonprofit organizations, with positive estimates for nonprofits in the same census tract (CI: 0.03-0.09) and those nearby (CI: 0.04-0.11), while estimates for organizations focused on groups with stigmatized conditions or marginalized identities are consistent with zero.
Nonprofit regulation in the United States is strongly influenced by society-wide political trends. This influence is especially evident today with respect to racial justice debates, partisan political divides, and significant changes in federal tax law. This commentary explores both how these trends are already affecting nonprofit regulation and how they might affect nonprofit regulation in the near future.
Across the globe, there has been a selective closure of civic space and a corresponding increase in scholarly research exploring the impact of authoritarianism on civil society organizations. This article examines the rollback of nonprofit First Amendment rights in U.S. states, an area overlooked to date by civil society scholars. A framework for categorizing authoritarian strategies used against nonprofits outside the U.S. is applied to current U.S. state policies and tested against a compilation of U.S. state laws and executive actions restricting nonprofit activity. A case study conducted in Texas involving interviews with migrant-serving nonprofits demonstrates the impact of these policies on direct service organizations on the ground. This analysis documents a new state authoritarianism that is restricting nonprofit service and advocacy space. The key conclusion is that U.S. nonprofit scholars should pay closer attention to the downstream effects of American authoritarianism as nonprofit civil liberties and behavior are being curtailed.
Performing prosocial acts such as volunteering represents a critical aspect of civic infrastructure. Research on this behavior comprises one of the largest sections of nonprofit literature but there remains limited theoretical and empirical understanding of nuanced components including informal behaviors and specific contexts. Our research builds on extant work to analyze the relationship between one's resources and their propensity to report formal or informal volunteering before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing inspiration from recent critiques, we hypothesize that resources are not objectively determined but rather depend on external and internal perceptions of these facets. We find evidence that, during non-crisis periods, informal volunteering depends less on external perception of one's resources than formal volunteering. During the pandemic, results again support that resources are perceived differently relative to the exact volunteer behavior being performed. Results speak to researchers interested in understanding the microlevel components that comprise civic infrastructure.
Section 501(c)(3) organizations in the United States work within a legal framework that was developed more than 100 years ago and that has not changed significantly in over 50 years. These rules are mostly designed to prevent and stop misuse of charitable funds Although that’s a laudable goal, those who write these rules seem to have lost sight of an equally important goal – to ensure that nonprofit leaders have rules that can help their organizations succeed. Nonprofits are more likely to succeed if their leaders understand the rules that guide them and have reasonable certainty the laws will be interpreted consistently. They also need rules that incentivize donors to provide maximum funding as quickly as possible, so that they have the resources to achieve their missions. With those principles in mind, this commentary suggests four major changes in the law: (1) the language in rules governing §501(c)(3)s should be stated more clearly and affirmatively; (2) the distinction between charitable and non-charitable activity should be clarified; (3) the charitable deduction rules should change; and (4) the distinction between private foundations and public charities should be eliminated.
This paper examines access to and impacts of two COVID-19 federal pandemic relief initiatives. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a new program to help "small businesses" cover near-term operating expenses and incentivize employers to retain employees. Pandemic relief also included increased COVID-19-specific funding for the existing Emergency Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. We frame our study with the Policy Feedback Framework to focus on how the policy design and implementation created resource effects and the messages nonprofits received when accessing the programs. We focus our study on the arts and culture sector, which was disproportionately impacted by the pandemic closures. We conducted an online survey of New York City nonprofit arts and culture organizations and semi-structured interviews with industry stakeholders six months into the pandemic closures. Survey results indicate that while the resource effects were mainly positive, the PPP implementation relied on a narrow conception of small businesses that did not align with nonprofit governance, arts and culture hiring practices, or revenue and expense models (negative interpretive effects). For those who accessed the PPP, its resource effects benefited the organizations in the near term. Few accessed the EIDL 30-year loan program mainly due to the financial risk of default. Nonprofit arts and culture organizations learned they must collectively advocate for inclusion in programs not adapted for their operating realities. After this study, the performing arts successfully advocated for a one-time $16.25 billion grant program titled the Shuttered Venue Operatrors Grant (SVOG). The lessons for policymakers are that 1) nonprofit governance structures are different from small businesses and 2) cookie-cutter approaches, like the PPP program design, create barriers for accessing resources.
